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What motherhood means and why it matters

By Andrea GordonFamily Issues Reporter

Wed., May 5, 2010

Everything begins with Mother. She has shaped leaders and tyrants and everyone in between, influenced civilization since the dawn of time.

Yet until recently, motherhood didn’t qualify as a subject worthy of scholarly study. The collective voice of mothers is seldom heard in ivory towers or corridors of power, or in the discussion of policies that affect us all.

We surveyed several people on the value of unique maternal studies program launched through York U. The program helped Tania Jivraj as a young single mom Photographed with her daughter Renee. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR)

“The minute you’re a mother, you’re aware of the absence,” says Andrea O’Reilly, 49, professor of women’s studies at York University. “Motherhood is the blind spot.”

She wanted to change that.

In 1991, O’Reilly developed Canada’s first university course on motherhood, at York. The Internet was in its infancy. Supermom was taking flight. Women were thrashing around with work and children, resigned to exhaustion following “the second shift.”

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Feminist writers and scholars were exploring motherhood, but often in isolation.

O’Reilly, who has three children, tapped into a hunger for research, debate and a grassroots community, along with the desire to reconcile feminism with mothering when the two were often at odds.

She held a conference, and was shocked when it attracted 150 researchers and academics from around the world. In 1998, she founded the Association for Research on Mothering, the first of its kind. It took on a life of its own.

Its journal, exploring everything from poverty to mothers in pop culture, popped up on university reading lists across the country and abroad.

Then came a publication division. Demeter Press has released 10 books, including one on mommy blogging and another called Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts, which challenged conventional parenting advice.

Earlier this year, mounting debt forced ARM, which had space at York but never received operating funding, to close its doors. The university acknowledged the association’s renown and 550 paying members but would not provide funds.

This month, following a groundswell of support from researchers in 15 countries, including Australia, Brazil and Spain, the association was reborn as an independent organization. The new Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement will be funded through memberships, sales of its publications, grants and fundraising, including a literary fundraiser in Toronto on May 21.

Right about the time O’Reilly launched ARM, Joy Rose found her voice in a different way. The mother of four started the band Housewives on Prozac as lead singer. Before kids, Rose had been a free spirit and rocker. As a suburban stay-at-home mom in New York she became critically ill with lupus. After a long recovery she realized she needed to return to music to feed her soul.

Rose, now 53, says it was a time of “bursting that bubble and getting rid of the gauze” that had prevented women from talking about the daunting parts of motherhood and loss of identity as well as the rewards.

The only way to resolve those struggles, she says, is by expressing them — in popular culture, the arts and in academia, which lays the foundation through research and legitimizes the discussion.

And the only chance of winning more social and workplace policies that support parents and families is to build a body of hard evidence and make noise.

“Mother studies’ age has come, there’s a critical mass,” says Rose, activist and founder of Mamapalooza festival, which showcases mothers in music and the arts.

Two years ago, Tania Jivraj was an overwhelmed single mom struggling to manage a 2-year-old and university.

Motherhood had been a struggle, beginning with post-partum depression and continuing with self-doubt.

“I thought I was supposed to know how to mother, just like you know how to breathe,” says Jivraj, now 37. But she often felt helpless, that she didn’t know what to do with her daughter.

One of her professors at Ryerson University, where she was studying social work, referred her to the annual ARM conference that brought together academic researchers, community workers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, at-home moms and activists.

She found camaraderie and fed off discussions at monthly gatherings on topics that had never occurred to her.

“It changed my life,” she says. “Before, I blamed myself for not being a good enough mother, there were a lot of ‘shoulds.’ Now I accept myself a lot more. I feel freer and I enjoy my daughter more.’ “

Annie Urban, blogger, mother, self-employed consultant

The tongue-in-cheek title of her blog is “PhD in Parenting.” So it’s hardly surprising that Annie Urban, a born researcher, might be a fan of maternal studies.

“Raising children is investing in our future. There’s plenty of academic focus on things like technology, politics, economics and other issues that will greatly impact our future,” argues Urban. So why not motherhood?

Urban, who actually has a bachelor of arts and an MBA, is a management consultant with two kids ages 5 and 3. She believes in learning through discussing and writing. Her husband stayed at home with the children for five years while she built her business. She wishes more women didn’t feel they have to choose between motherhood and work.

Urban says there’s a lot to investigate about the myriad ways that women mother, why they choose to have children, and the supports they need.

“So often studies that do talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parenting look at decisions in isolation, without understanding all of the pressures that mothers face,” she wrote in an email from Germany, where her family is on sabbatical.

Marie Porter, Australian researcher and grandmother

Marie Porter spent 37 years actively raising three sons, including one who was severely disabled. At the same time, she gradually earned a university degree.

Her focus at first was religion and history. Until she began talking to mothers who were engaged and passionate about their roles but felt their work not valued by society.

“I felt I must change this situation,” she explained by email from her home in Brisbane. “I also considered motherhood to be a great area of study and totally neglected.”

Today, Porter has a PhD and is honorary research advisor specializing in maternal studies at the women’s studies centre at the University of Queensland.

After years of toiling on her own, she attended ARM’s first conference in 1998 and joined a community of maternal scholars from around the world. A few years later, she was the driving force behind a similar Australian initiative. But she says research is not just for the sake of academics.

“We are all only on this earth because some woman carried us, birthed us a nurtured us. I have yet to meet a mother who is not interested in maternal research, regardless of age, status or occupation,” says Porter, who has six grandkids.

“One way to promote mothering is to make it a legitimate area of study.”

Kerry Daly, director of the Father Involvement Research Initiative, University of Guelph

As the early rumblings of maternal studies started back in 1991 in Toronto, Kerry Daly set out on a parallel course in Guelph, launching his first project researching fathers. It’s “two sides of the same coin,” says Daly, associate dean of the social and applied human sciences at the University of Guelph

Studying parenthood — through the separate lenses of mothers and fathers — can lead to tools and resources that will help them both become better parents and in turn, boost their children’s health and well-being, says says Daly, 54.

He notes the shared goal is to benefit the kids and promote more equal division of responsibility. But some of the issues are different.

Mothers need recognition, partnership and choices after a long history of doing work that was largely invisible, and not valued.

But as the roles shift and fathers get more involved, men need encouragement to nurture and care for kids their own way, and not always be measured against mother as “the gold standard” or the notion that “why don’t men step up to the plate and be just like mothers.”

Louise Moody, executive director of Humewood House, a centre for young pregnant women and mothers

In her 20 years working and volunteering in parent support programs, Louise Moody has seen women’s choices, options and reasons for becoming mothers change dramatically.

But there’s still a prevailing “motherhood and apple pie” notion of how women should do it, says the executive director of Humewood House, a resource centre for pregnant teens and young mothers.

She sees it in the attitudes towards the young women she works with.

“There’s a huge social stigma because you’re doing it ‘wrong’ and you’re doing it ‘too early.’ “

New scholarly research “shakes the tree” and challenges those notions, says Moody, who was actively involved in ARM’s 2007 journal on young mothers. She says a grassroots research community also empowers young women by giving voice to their experience and creating peer groups and support networks.

“There’s much you can learn by finding out you’re not the only one.”

Moody, 49, and a mother of three sons, says the maternal research and discussion has had a personal impact.

“It’s changed my life and how I support other women, you let go of the judgment.”

John Ryder, father and businessman

He describes himself as “not your typical supporter of maternal studies.” But John Ryder, who runs a public diamond exploration company, says it’s a field of study that makes a lot of sense.

As a businessman who knows the value of research and investment, he says maternal studies is “an essential field.” He also notes it’s one of the few roles that has been accorded any economic value.

“If we really look at the impact of mothering, it affects everything in our lives,” says Ryder who has two teenage daughters.

As a society, we invest in prenatal care and research on breastfeeding, “but we also need to look at the broader context of motherhood,” he adds.

“At the end of the day, we are all products of our genetics and our mothers.”

Ryder stumbled onto maternal studies largely by virtue of location — he’s O’Reilly’s neighbour and was among the first to write letters of support to York.

Joanna Radbord, lawyer

As a young woman and feminist, Joanna Radbord considered motherhood an “oppressive institution” that didn’t interest her.

When the hardworking family and equality rights lawyer became a mother herself, she was not prepared for how thoroughly it would change her.

“I expected to treat my baby like any other task I had faced - to be meticulously researched, highly controlled and perfectly completed,” she says. “With pregnancy, birth, and highly demanding baby, my worldview had to shift.”

She became a mother first, changed her workload and rethought her notion of feminism.

The 39-year-old now has two sons, ages 6 and 1, with her same-sex spouse. She says for a lesbian mother, the ARM community, felt “like a comfortable refuge from an unfriendly social climate.” It also made her think.

She believes studying motherhood is the way to challenge assumptions, understand different experiences and help women feel confident about their choices without judging others.

Ann Douglas, parenting author, mother

Author Ann Douglas has talked to enough parents and written enough books to know there is no one “right way” to do anything, especially when it comes to being a mother.

At a time when the popular culture has pitted mothering styles and choices against one another, she also believes most mothers crave support and the opportunity to learn from each other, rather than judgment.

That’s why the Peterborough mother of four supports research, discourse and bringing all sides and experiences into the open.

“Putting motherhood under the microscope increases our knowledge and understanding of what it means to be a mother,” says Douglas, author of The Mother of All Parenting Books and countless others and a prolific online writer (including on her blog at The Star’s parentcentral.ca).

It can also ease the transition for many first-time mothers who can find it “shocking, isolating, and emotionally draining.”

“Mothers have a lot to teach one another,” says Douglas. And it’s in the best interests of everyone — including the children — to help them do that.

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